CDMA is rapidly becoming the predominant form of communication between mobile stations and the base transceiver stations that serve these mobile stations. Voice is transmitted to CDMA stations as a series of air-interface frames containing frames spaced at 20 millisecond intervals. The frames may be a full rate frame, a half rate frame, a quarter rate frame, or an eighth rate frame when coding arrangement is such that the minimum size satisfactory frame is used for each frame. Thus, when the direction of the signal toward the mobile station has a voice signal which is predominantly silence or background noise, this signal is transmitted as a series of one-eighth rate frames. When actual speech with a minimum of pauses is being transmitted, it is transmitted predominantly as a series of full rate frames. The advantage of using various sizes of frames is that power sent over the radio waves is conserved, thus maximizing the number of simultaneous conversations which can be supported. The signals from the base transceiver station to the mobile station also are used for conveying signaling messages. Examples of signaling messages are a direction to hand off a conversation, by tuning to a channel from which the mobile station is currently receiving a strong signal, and a neighbor list, which the mobile station uses to check for the strength of received radio signals. Since CDMA does not use a dedicated separate signaling channel, the signaling messages are multiplexed onto the same bit stream as the voice frames. The multiplexer takes a signaling message and cuts it into signaling fragments for combination with lower rate voice frames, producing full rate air-interface frames.